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21 J.L. & Pol'y 317 (2012-2013)
Authorship Attribution: What's Easy and What's Hard

handle is hein.journals/jlawp21 and id is 329 raw text is: AUTHORSHIP ATTRIBUTION: WHAT'S EASY AND WHAT'S HARD? Moshe Koppel, * Jonathan Schler,t and Shlomo Argamon** INTRODUCTION The simplest kind of authorship attribution problem-and the one that has received the most attention-is the one in which we are given a small, closed set of candidate authors and are asked to attribute an anonymous text to one of them. Usually, it is assumed that we have copious quantities of text by each candidate author and that the anonymous text is reasonably long. A number of recent survey papers' amply cover the variety of methods used for solving this problem. Unfortunately, the kinds of authorship attribution problems we typically encounter in forensic contexts are more difficult than this simple version in a number of ways. First, the number of suspected writers might be very large, possibly numbering in the many thousands. Second, there is often no guarantee that the true author of an anonymous text is among the known suspects. Finally, the amount of writing we have by each candidate might be very limited and the anonymous text itself might be short. * Department of Computer Science, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat-Gan, Israel, moishk@gmail.com (Corresponding Author). t Department of Computer Science, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat-Gan, Israel, schler@gmail.com. ** Department of Computer Science, Illinois Institute of Technology, argamon@iit.edu. 1 Patrick Juola, Authorship Attribution, 1 FOUND. & TRENDS IN INFO. RETRIEVAL 233, 238-39 (2006); Moshe Koppel et al., Computational Methods in Authorship Attribution, 60 J. AM. Soc'Y FOR INFO. SCI. & TECH. 9, 9 (2009); Efstathios Stamatatos, A Survey of Modem Authorship Attribution Methods, 60 J. AM. Soc'Y FOR INFO. SCI. & TECH. 538, 539 (2009). 317

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